Watching TV with your toddler

By Sarah Weir

Monday

Apr 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 30, 2012 at 10:20 AM

If you are a mom or dad, it’s a good chance you have been involved in some sort of conversation or discussion about kids and television. How much should kids watch? None? An hour or two? Several? As many as they want? Which shows are appropriate for younger children to watch? How old should they be when they are allowed to watch shows or movies with certain themes, actions or explicit vocabulary? Should I even care about what my kids are watching?

While those are very worthwhile topics I could talk a good bit about and possibly incite some arguments and discussions… I’m not going to. This time. Those are questions I’m still pondering and may share something after some more thought.

Instead, the question I am asking is “Have you ever watched TV with a toddler?” If you haven’t and are soon about to, well, get ready for some fun. “Fun” being used in a very flexible way to mean sometimes cute and adorable, and sometimes wanting to buy the best pair of earplugs money can buy. Or just run out of the room. Screaming.

Why?

First off because toddlers like a lot of repetition so the shows frequently repeat things. You may find your toddler watching the same show or movie 15+ times in a row (or, if you are lucky, the same show but different episodes) with no sign of getting tired of it. Until they move on to the next thing.

Secondly, while a lot of kids love these shows geared toward this age, they really can be some of the most annoying shows ever. They know these kids love repetition, so they do. They may do the same order of everything in each show but with a different topic. If you’ve ever watched Elmo’s World, this is a classic example - from beginning to end it is always the same order of events, usually including the same musical tunes, just using a different topic to give information and some variety. This amount of repetition is usually not needed for adults and tends to get tedious rather quickly. Elmo is one of the less annoying ones for me to watch. I won’t name some of the more annoying ones for me as it is always helpful to have an open mind.

Thirdly, any time these shows have music and especially when it's mostly the same songs every time, you will have some of these songs stuck in your head, often for hours. If I had a quarter for each time I had one or two kids songs stuck in my head for at least a day and frequently for two, I don’t think I would need to worry about college tuition for Reilly.

This is about the time you start to wonder if there is a world outside the realm of small kids and toddler shows, grasping anything that will keep you relatively sane.

While I haven’t been exactly up on some of the more recent children’s shows until not too long ago, there is one show I’ve just been hoping Reilly would never find.

While I will not name it, it does involve brightly colored dinosaur costumes with dancing and singing songs such as “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family” and a theme song to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. I’m fairly certain this particular character is up on a level for me as “He Who Must Not Be Named” in the Harry Potter world. Not because this character is evil, but only because I watched so much more than I wanted to when my sister was little and he has to be the most annoying character ever created in the world - for me. (Notice I am saying “for me." I’m not suggestion this to be anyone else’s opinion.)

So, while Reilly blissfully bypassed this show for many months, you can imagine my thoughts when I started to hear strains of the theme song from this show coming from the Netflix app on my phone while Reilly was playing with it.

While my first instinct was to scream “no!” and take it away from him to, at the very least, change it to something else, I didn’t. Again, that thing about having an open mind. I didn’t want to influence Reilly’s thoughts about something that was just extremely annoying for me. It was mostly because this wasn’t about me, but also because I don’t think it’s O.K. to give anyone a prejudice for or against something merely because I don’t like it.

So, I waited.

I tried not to listen too much - just enough to make sure they weren’t telling him bad stuff like it was O.K. to hit people, do drugs, or get into cars with strangers (Sadly, no excuse to turn it off there). I distracted myself with something else. Thankfully, it only lasted about 10 minutes.

When Reilly is finding a new show he is interested in, he will often watch something anywhere between 30 seconds to 15 minutes or so to see if it is something he likes. Then he switches to the next thing that looks interesting.

I hoped Reilly would be done with this show, but no. Sadly, two or three days later he turned the show on again, this time on the TV. (I forgot to mention that Reilly has become rather adept at using various technological devices. I’ll let you know when I decide if that’s a good thing or not.) Again, I cringed, but I didn't move to change it.

If Reilly seemed to be not that interested, I would have suggested that he watch something else, or turn it off and just play. Instead, Reilly started dancing and was smiling and happily moving to the music.

Sigh.

Have you ever seen an adorable kid bouncing and dancing happily around the room with huge smiles on their face? If not, first time you do just be prepared for some heart melting. This is one of the states I love to see Reilly in. It warms me all over and gives me another reason to love him (not that I haven’t accumulated a billion or more by now- it just keeps growing).

This particular mom just couldn’t trade my child’s happiness in this moment just for my inconvenience - no matter how annoying or aggravating it was for me.

Each Monday, the PhillyBurbs Moms guide features a guest column from Sarah Weir, Middletown resident and mother of 2-year-old Reilly Weir. Sarah’s columns will highlight some of the joys and challenges of being a first-time mom. She’ll also pass on what she has learned along the way. Sarah can be reached at ducksrain@gmail.com

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